Wednesday, 14 June 2017

Well. The UK Election is done with.
The Conservatives have slipped up and Labour have got their voters in. Onward and upward.

One thing I have noticed ... one thing that has been puzzling me ... is when, exactly, did the word "socialist" become a term of deep abuse in the UK? It may not be your flavour of politics but to some so-called pundits it seems to have become a politics "beyond the pale". Link it to the term Marxist and apparently we should all be running around in circles and checking under the bed for bugaboos.

The recent Labour Party Manifesto kicked this off, talk of getting rid of student loans, perhaps re-nationalising part of the transport grid.. government energy companies and so forth. This... they have been saying... is Marxism.

Did my conservative father realise he was living in a Marxist state during my 1950s childhood, I wonder? As he duly voted for Churchill, Eden, Macmillan? Under whose Conservative governments we continued to enjoy in the main Labour's free schooling, free healthcare, public transport, government owned utility companies? The post-war consensus?

We obviously did not see that these apparent pillars of Conservative Government were being manipulated by Uncle Joe from behind Winnie's "Iron Curtain".

I wonder ... how did my family escape the gulags? What with all those Ladies Nights down at the Lodge? Surely that was punishable under a Marxist regime?
Perhaps I was too traumatised and mistook the gulags for the leafy suburbs of Kent.